"These then are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. The ‘scientific’ proof that you are right may not be clear before the day of judgment (or some stage of being which that expression may serve to symbolize) is reached. But the faithful fighters of this hour, or the beings that then and there will represent them, may turn to the faint-hearted, who here decline to go on, with words like those with which Henry IV greeted the tardy Crillon after a great battle had been gained: ‘Hang yourself, brave Crillon! We fought at Arques, and you were not there!’"
-William James

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear, —both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
-Wordsworth

With that I leapt out upon him, presented my gun at him at full-cock, and says I, "Your worship will please to walk before me into yonder wood if he will not be treated as an enemy." So he answered very gravely, "To such treatment my likes are not accustomed": but I pushed him very politely along and, "Your honour," said I, "will not for once refuse to bow to the necessities of the times." So when I had brought him safely to my people in the wood and had set my sentries again, I asked him who he was: to which he answered very haughtily I need not ask that, for I knew already he was a great god. I thought he might perhaps know me, and might be a nobleman of Soest that thus spoke to rally me; for 'tis the custom to jeer at the people of Soest about their great idol with the golden apron: but soon I was aware that instead of a prince I had caught a madman, one that had studied too much and gone mad over poetry: for when he grew a little more acquainted with me he told me plainly he was the great god Jupiter himself.

I also wonder how Gods of Egypt will do. It does seem this type of film doesn't make money unless it's part of an established franchise like Lord of the Rings.

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Usual caveats about not endorsing/refuting real world beliefs ->

"...Since the early eighteenth century, occultists have called the Tarot the Book of Thoth, giving it an Egyptian provenance most modern scholars reject.

Yet Eliphas Levi claimed that the true Book of Thoth was Egypt itself, or what was left of it, its pyramids, obelisks, temples, and Sphinx, which can be read and interpreted like a secret text, an idea he shared with Schwaller de Lubicz.

Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Hermes Trismegistus was known as “the Egyptian,” as it was he who embodied the sacred knowledge of those holy people. And it was in his writings and those by his disciples, known to us as the Hermetica or Corpus Hermeticum, that Hermes Trismegistus communicated the divine revelation he had received at the dawn of time. This was the prisca theologia and “perennial philosophy” that was later handed down from adept to adept throughout the ages..."

“But who are the grown-ups?”
“Don’t ask me,” she answered. “That’s a question for a neurotheologian.”
“Meaning what?” he asked.
“Meaning precisely what it says. Somebody who thinks about people in terms, simultaneously, of the Clear Light of the Void and the vegetative nervous system. The grown-ups are a mixture of Mind and physiology.”

“There is a unity in the universe, enjoying value and (by its immanence) sharing value. For example, take the subtle beauty of a flower in some isolated glade of a primeval forest. No animal has ever had the subtlety of experience to enjoy its fully beauty. And yet this beauty is a grand fact in the universe. When we survey nature and think however flitting and superficial has been the animal enjoyment of its wonders, and when we realize how incapable the separate cells and pulsations of each flower are of enjoying the total effect—then our sense of the value of the details for the totality dawns upon our consciousness. That is the intuition of holiness, the intuition of the sacred, which is at the foundation of al religion.”
-Alfred North Whitehead

Heh I've decided to just watch the show and not touch the books again until the series is complete.

=-=-=

Usual caveats of not endorsing/refuting real world beliefs.

Jung on his entrance into the practice of Active Imagination:

Quote:

I really prefer the term “imagination” to “fantasy”… fantasy is merely nonsense, a phantasm, a fleeting impression; but imagination is active, purposeful creation….

A fantasy is more or less your own invention, and remains on the surface of personal things and conscious expectations. But active imagination, as the term denotes, means that the images have a life of their own and that the symbolic events develop according to their own logic—that is, of course, if your conscious reason does not interfere.

Quote:

Not knowing what would come next, I thought perhaps more introspection was needed. When we introspect we look within and see if there is anything to be observed, and if there is nothing we may either give up the introspective process or find a way of “boring through” to the material that escapes the first survey. I devised such a boring method by fantasizing that I was digging a hole, and by accepting this fantasy as perfectly real. This is naturally somewhat difficult to do—to believe so thoroughly in a fantasy that it leads you into further fantasy, just as if you were digging a real hole and passing from one discovery to another. But when I began on that hole I worked and worked so hard that I knew something had to come of it—that fantasy had to produce, and lure out, other fantasies.

Finally, I felt I had come to a place where I could go not further down. I said to myself that, that being the case, I would then go horizontally, and then it seemed as if I were in a corridor, and as though I were wading into black slime. I went in, thinking to myself that this was the remnant of an old mine.…

The spirit of the depths opened my eyes and I caught a glimpse of the inner things, the world of my soul, the many-formed and changing….

I stand in black dirt up to my ankles in a dark cave. Shadows sweep over me. I am seized by fear, but I know I must go in. I crawl through a narrow crack in the rock and reach an inner cave whose bottom is covered with black water. But beyond this I catch a glimpse of a luminous red stone which I must reach. I wade through the muddy water. The cave is full of the frightful noise of shrieking voices. I take the stone, it covers a dark opening in the rock. I hold the stone in my hand, peering around inquiringly. I do not want to listen to the voices, they keep me away. But I want to know. Here something wants to be uttered. I place my ear to the opening. I hear the flow of underground waters. I see the bloody head of a man on the dark stream. Someone wounded, someone slain floats there. I take in this image for a long time, shuddering. I see a large black scarab floating past on the dark stream. In the deepest reach of the stream shines a red sun, radiating through the dark water. There I see—and a terror seizes me— small serpents on the dark rock walls, striving toward the depths, where the sun shines. A thousand serpents crowd around, veiling the sun. Deep night falls. A red stream of blood, thick red blood springs up, surging for a long time, then ebbing. I am seized by fear. What did I see?

We all recognize the power of story. That most universal of creative processes, supremely powerful mirror for our hopes, dreams and fears.

Stories are not only the fabric of movies, books, the news, and endless other forms of communication. Stories are woven into our lives in the grandest and most ordinary ways, from the birth of civilizations to what happened on the way to work.

Story is evolutionary. From myths to fairy tales, from novels to cinema, stories guide us towards self-discovery and greater purpose.

Stephen King likens writing a story to slowly uncovering a fossil. Margaret Atwood says it is like approaching a far-off city, gradually discovering its details. Stories unfold out of their own internal dynamics. The characters tell the author what they would do. The theme takes the author by surprise. Somehow, the story’s whole exists before its parts.

Those whose life work is crafting stories come to recognize this mystery: a story is a living thing.

If a story is alive, what then is its biology?

What are the patterns and processes of growth and meaning intrinsic to story? And to what extent are these present in the apparent randomness of our own lives?

As our lives and the world we live in unfold at an ever more hyperbolic pace, how can the living properties of story guide us?

The Biology of Story will explore these questions through the medium of a large-scale, web-based interactive documentary. It will present a new theory of story based on the experience of story creators, but encompassing the myriad roles that story plays in our lives.

Well, basically... they eat people. ;)
They resemble the depiction of the farastu in Planescape (but without the sticky tar).

Deodands are humanoids which look like handsome, muscular human men, but with "dead black lustreless skin and long slit eyes, fangs and claws." They are strong, murderous, and carnivorous creatures, but can be killed with offensive spells, which they fear. In Cugel's Saga, the wizard Follinense believes they are a mixture of basilisk, wolverine, and man.

In Songs of the Dying Earth there is an interesting story (first picture) in which a charlatan wizard and a deodand are shackled to each other by a spell. As none is able to dispose of the other they spend their time playing a board game. The deodand is defeated time and time again but finally masters the human ideas of strategy und bluffing to overthrow his adversary.

Ah interesting stuff - the idea of a lesser fiend having to understand human guile is an interesting premise. Imagine it climbing up the ranks of its kind and then repaying/"repaying" the person it had been shackled to - perhaps by showing mercy, or "freeing" it from the burden of loved ones.

=-=-=

I ran down Gray’s Inn Road and ran
Till I was under a black bridge.
This was me at nineteen
Late at night arriving between
The buildings of the City of London.
…
Midnight. I hear the moon
Light chiming on St Paul’s.
The City is empty. Night
Watchmen are drinking their tea,
The Fire had burnt out.
The Plague’s pits had closed
And gone into literature.
Between the big buildings
I sat like a flea crouched
In the stopped works of a watch.
-W.S Graham’s The Night City

With a quantitative conception of space, it is impossible to apprehend any of these things. In fact, spiritual visions and events imply the existence of different kinds of spaces. These are spiritual or qualitative spaces, where the events of the soul take place. “Such space,” Corbin writes, “is existential space, whose relationship to physico-mathematical space is analogous to the relationship of existential time to the historical time of chronology.” The proper measure of that space is the state of the soul. It is indeed a place “where time becomes reversible and where space is a function of desire, because it is only the external aspect of an internal state.”

To designate this “existential space,” which is the location of visionary events, Corbin coined the term mundus imaginalis.

As a “median and mediating” world, the imaginal world shares aspects of both the world of sensation and the world of intellectual forms. It is a world “‘where the spiritual takes a body and the body becomes spiritual,’ a world consisting of real matter and real extension, though by comparison to sensible, corruptible matter these are subtile and immaterial.”

The function of the mundus imaginalis defined by its ability to symbolise with the worlds it mediates: On the one hand [the mundus imaginalis] immaterialises the Sensible Forms, on the other it “imaginalises” the Intellectual Forms to which it gives shape and dimension. The Imaginal world creates symbols on the one hand from the Sensible Forms, on the other from the Intellectual Forms.

Accordingly, the mundus imaginalis requires a faculty of perception that is proper to it. This faculty is the active Imagination, which Corbin sharply distinguishes from the imaginary or “fantasy.” The latter secretes nothing but the imaginary, the unreal, whereas the active Imagination has a cognitive function just as fundamental and objective as sensation or intellection. The active Imagination is the organ that allows the exegete to penetrate the mundus imaginalis, where the reality of symbols is verified.

“The Cosmotheandric vision is the most obvious human experience, so obvious that it becomes an obstacle to see it once we begin to specialize in our knowledge and forget the whole…The vision of primordial Man, and I suspect our first vision as children as well, is an undiscriminated view of the whole. To see parts as parts presupposes already the view of a certain totality of which the parts are parts. One of the most common data of which humanity is aware is not the notion of Being but the experience of Life. We experience ourselves as living, and we see life everywhere. Reality is not a dead thing.”
-Raimon Panikkar

In Mongolian, one who travels the realms of the Tengers is called a Tengeri—“sky-dweller; sky-walker.” I like to think that Luke Skywalker, the young warrior-shaman Jedi knight of the fictional Star Wars films, may have inherited his name from this tradition. Interestingly, the BBC reports that in censuses taken in 2001 regarding spiritual beliefs, hundreds of thousands of people selected “Jediism” as their faith of choice—such is the power of shamanism even in our modern myths and legends.

In our discussions regarding the various realms and deities, shamans in Mongolia described these using the same vague term—Tenger. There seemed to be no differentiation in word usage between the realm and the deities. The concept of Dingir, Tenger, or “heavenly sky forces” is not a new one; it also worked well for shamans on the steppe of Inner Asia.

The Tengers were divided into White and Black. White Tengers came to be known as all-knowing, all-compassionate inhabitants of the Western part of the Upper World, akin to deities, while the fierce, ethnocentric Black Tengers, often invoked for power or vengeance, were seen as being from the Eastern part of the Upper World. Thus came into being the pan-Mongolian cosmology of the Ninety-Nine Skies (realms) of the Upper World, with fifty-five White Tengers in the West and forty-four Black Tengers in the East. There is some talk in Mongolia that so many new shamans are now being recruited by the spirits because of a war between these two spiritual regions; but opinions differ widely, and conjecture over coffee and vodka can run wild.

Everything is but revelation; there can only be re-velation. But
revelation comes from the Spirit, and there is no knowledge of the Spirit.

It will soon be dusk, but for now the clouds are still clear, the pines are not yet darkened, for the lake brightens them into transparency. And everything is green with a green richer than pulling all the organ stops in recital. It must be heard seated, very close to the Earth, arms crossed, eyes closed, pretending to sleep.

For it is not necessary to strut about like a conqueror and want to give a name to things, to everything; it is they who will tell you who they are, if you listen...

- Henry Corbin, Theology by the Lakeside, 1932, written while sitting by Lake Siljan, Sweden

The old gods are dead. Burning and crumbling, the divine realm dropped from the sky and smashed into the world like a vengeful star. The earth was plunged into darkness. Hope shriveled. Life has become cheap, brutal, and short. But from the ashes of this catastrophe, you can awaken your own divine spark. Claim a dominion; declare yourself the god of War, of the Hunt, of Winter, of Fire, or of the realm of your choice. And if you can complete your divine labors, fulfill prophecy, and throw down the despots that rose in place of the fallen gods, you might redeem a world fallen into evil. You might truly become—a god!

Quote:

An asteroid will soon wipe out all life on earth. You know this—and you know when—because it’s in the history books your grandparents brought back to the Cretaceous period with them. Now your small society is trapped in prehistory, desperate to find a way back to your time. But at least you're not alone. You have tech, weapons, vehicles, and science from the future—you even have the ability to bioengineer the dinosaurs around you. Can you use these tools to survive a dangerous world on the brink of extinction?

Is that the sound of thunder you hear?

Quote:

When they locked you up, you made the mask. When you wear it, you can do the impossible. Just like the comic books.

But the mask has always done more: It shows a world beyond the everyday grey skein of cities and people. Something golden and perfect. But the longer you wear it, the more your old self slips away. It's like drowning. But the power calls to you.

There are others like you, good, bad and indifferent. All searching for what they call Magonia—the place from their ruined childhoods, where they once escaped from this broken down world. And they all know, as you know, that something terrible is coming.

Corbin’s hermeneutics postulates the occurrence of Revelation, namely the “epiphanic descent” of the Divine Word into Creation. In the course of its manifestation, the Word undergoes a progressive objectification—what Corbin describes as a “corporalisation of the spiritual.”

The “condensation” of the Word progresses along a plurality of universes in descending order in a sort of dialectic of manifestation and occultation, such that “the exoteric of each degree becomes the esoteric at the lower degree.”

Corbin likens the manner in which the exoteric relates to the esoteric to that of a mirror in which an image is suspended: “the mirror shows the image, and in showing it, shows its presence ‘elsewhere’ in another dimension.” In this perspective, the exoteric is the “apparitional form,”the “epiphanic place” (mazhar), of the esoteric.

The exterior is not something different from the interior, but rather is the interior itself transposed to a different level of being.

We are not dealing here with irreality. The mundus imaginalis is a world of autonomous forms and images...It is a perfectly real world preserving all the richness and diversity of the sensible world but in a spiritual state.
-Henry Corbin

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And the rock he touched was the socket of all men's eyes
And he touched the spring of vision
-Vernon Watkins Taliesin and the Spring of Vision

=-=-=

A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye
Or if he pleaseth through it pass
And then the heavens espy
-George Herbert The Elixir

Mourning
The dark eagles, sleep and death,
Rustle all night around my head:
The golden statue of man
Is swallowed by the icy comber
Of eternity. On the frightening reef
The purple remains go to pieces,
And the dark voice mourns
Over the sea.
Sister in my wild despair
Look, a precarious skiff is sinking
Under the stars,
The face of night whose voice is fading.

Melusine
At my windows the night weeps -
The night is mute, the wind probably weeps,
The wind, like a lost child -
What is it that makes him weep so?
O poor Melusine!

Like fire her hair blows in the storm,
Like fire passing clouds, and laments -
There for you, you poor maiden,
My heart speaks a still night prayer!
O poor Melusine!

Lewis Hyde tells the wild Tsimshian trickster story "Raven Becomes Voracious," as a way to explore the contradiction of having a mortal body while trying to lead an ascetic life, and offers wisdom on the unavoidable trap of desire.

Says Hyde, "This is a story of descent. In heaven there are beings who do not eat; in this lower world of stomachs and fish there are mortals who eat constantly. The trickster Raven is a mixture, the shining boy plus appetite, a being of considerable power who is unable to satiate his hunger. Trickster makes the world, gives it sunlight, fish, and berries, but he makes it "as it is," a world of constant need, work, limitation, and death."

Henry Corbin (1903-1978) was a scholar, philosopher and theologian. He was a champion of the transformative power of the Imagination and of the transcendent reality of the individual in a world threatened by totalitarianisms of all kinds. One of the 20th century’s most prolific scholars of Islamic mysticism, Corbin was Professor of Islam & Islamic Philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of Teheran. He was a major figure at the Eranos Conferences in Switzerland. He introduced the concept of the mundus imaginalis into contemporary thought. His work has provided a foundation for archetypal psychology as developed by James Hillman and influenced countless poets and artists worldwide. But Corbin’s central project was to provide a framework for understanding the unity of the religions of the Book: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. His great work Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi is a classic initiatory text of visionary spirituality that transcends the tragic divisions among the three great monotheisms. Corbin’s life was devoted to the struggle to free the religious imagination from fundamentalisms of every kind. His work marks a watershed in our understanding of the religions of the West and makes a profound contribution to the study of the place of the imagination in human life.

Quote:

For all our esotericists, the interior world designates the spiritual reality of the supersensible universe which, while a spiritual reality, is that which encircles and envelopes the reality of the external world... 'To leave' that which we commonly call the exterior world is an experience not at all 'subjective' but as 'objective' as possible, but it is difficult to transmit this to a spirit wanting to be modern. - En Islam Iranien v. 1, 82

The Active Imagination guides, anticipates, molds sensory perception; that is why it transmutes sensory data into symbols. The Burning Bush is only a brushwood fire if it is merely perceived by the sensory organs. In order that Moses may perceive the Burning Bush and hear the Voice calling him 'from the right side of the valley' - in short, in order that there may be a theophany - an organ of trans-sensory perception is needed. - Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi, 80

…The seriousness of the role of the Imagination is stressed by our [Iranian] philosophers when they state that it can be 'the Tree of Blessedness' or on the contrary 'the Accursed Tree' of which the Qur'an speaks… The imaginary can be innocuous, the imaginal never can. - Spiritual Body & Celestial Earth, vii-x.

On a soapbox in a town square, madman Doryld "The Doryld" Surpass,
messiah-in-his-own-head, proclaims his divinity and rallies his (non-existent) followers to his side. He is the new Divine! His audience of three, two of whom are drunk (the other may be you), ask for proof of his powers. He resists. They insist. He deflects - only the true Divine would say no when asked to demonstrate his powers. He asks them what good happened in their lives today. The drunks say they found a bottle of wine. The Doryld claims responsibility for that.

One of the drunks is converted.

Quote:

Fadeland Johns
Fadeland Johns sits in the tavern in Driftwood yapping about the good old days. Young 'uns today don't know nothin', back then real adventurin' was done with a bloody sword in one hand and a bottle in the other. Johns'll go out there and show 'em how it's done. Soon as she finishes this drink. If you say the slightest word against her she'll draw on you, and you'll have to kill her. Then she gets back up on her stool and starts drinking again... because behind the mask of the adventurer she's undead. The will to adventure keeps her alive. The decrepit state of her body keeps her from leaving the tavern.

Quote:

Eithne
Eithne wanders the Blood Forest, laden with books and scrolls. She was a Divine Order librarian until the Black Ring put her whole institute of learning to the torch. Desperately trying to save her precious books, Eithne perished in the blaze. But, as the magical scrolls combusted and their ashes littered her corpse, she was resurrected. With a burning zeal to spread forgotten knowledge and a passionate hatred of the Black Ring, she travels north through Beckonbridge Fort to establish a new library. Of course, she has books to trade - mostly rare and arcane knowledge better left unlearnt...

Lost ContinentsEver since the days of the Greeks, people have tried to prove that thriving civilizations once existed on huge islands that have since sunk beneath the sea.

By L. Sprague de Camp

The name “Atlantis” evokes a picture of a beautiful world with a high and colorful culture, now, alas, gone forever, but still celebrated in story and controversy. What about Atlantis, Lemuria, and other “lost continents?” Is there “something to it?”

Men have always yearned for a land of beauty and plenty where peace and justice reigned. Failing to make one in fact, they have consoled themselves by imagining Edens, Utopias, and Golden Ages. Formerly they put them in the remote past or in unexplored places. Now that most of the world has been explored and human history is fairly well known, they put them on other planets or in the future.

One of the most successful creators of ideal communities was the Greek philosopher Aristoklés the son of Aristón, better known as Plato. Around 355 B.C. he wrote two Socratic dialogues, Timaeus and Critias, in which is set forth the story of Atlantis. Except for Plato’s tale and the commentaries on it by his successors, there is not another word about Atlantis in the Greco-Roman, Egyptian and Babylonian literature that has come down to us.

In Timaeus, Critias explains that he got the story from his grandfather, who got it from his father, who got it from the statesman Solón, to whom it had been told by a priest of Saïs, in Egypt.

The story is that 9000 years earlier there had been a great Athenian empire, organized along the lines that Plato had set forth in his Republic. The state was ruled by a communistic military caste, and everybody was brave, handsome, and virtuous. There had also been a mighty empire of Atlantis, an island west of the Pillars of Hercules, larger than North Africa and Asia Minor combined.
...